See What Testosterone Does To The Body

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Wall Street is a place of dramatic swings, combative personalities and tons of risk. No shocker, then, that the men and women that work there are affected by a little chemical called testosterone.

Testosterone is hormone that is secreted into the body and is the genetic driver to the growth and maturing of sexual organs and sexual identity. Higher or lower levels in evidence can be signals of fertility or sex drive in men and menstruation issues for women. Increased levels in men are also useful in the building of muscle mass.

Your level of testosterone after winning or losing can predict whether or not you'll compete again.

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Testosterone levels change after a wins or a loss. Researchers found that those changes could then predict what a loser would do next.

So losers who after competing, had increased levels of testosterone, were more likely to compete again. But those who lost a competition, and had testosterone levels decrease, were less likely to compete again.

On the other hand, when traders generate cortisol in excess, they can suffer from anxiety, selective recall, and paranoia. "The bear market persists as the financial industry, or much of it, becomes, in (John) Coates's term, a "clinical population" unable to make the most of the opportunities it finds," says Bloomberg.

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High levels of testosterone can make you susceptible to disease.

At the sites where a few mice had gotten real implants, ALL of the mice started mixing more and passing diseases to each other. Just having a few mice with higher testosterone levels impacted the whole group.

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Testosterone affects generosity; more testosterone can make men more selfish

In one study, researchers found that men with increased testosterone "were 27% less generous towards strangers with money they controlled."

Men with lower levels of testosterone were significantly more generous than men with more testosterone.

Higher testosterone levels in CEOs makes them quicker to accept or reject a deal.

Business Insider

Researchers found that "young male" CEOs -- younger than 45 -- "are more likely than older men or women to both initiate and kill M&A deals." And they concluded that it was testosterone that caused that behavior. (Testosterone decreases in men as they age, which is another interesting fact in itself).

"Young male CEOs appear to be combative... [as] a result of testosterone levels that are higher in young males. Testosterone... has been shown to inﬂuence prospects for a cooperative outcome of the ultimatum game. Speciﬁcally, high-testosterone responders tend to reject low offers even though this is against their interest."

Testosterone increases the need for revenge in general.

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A study at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management showed that the presence of testosterone in a business negotiation can create a desire for more retaliation if one party (the one with testosterone) thinks they are being "low-balled."

The study placed men, women and women with "higher levels of prenatal testosterone exposure" in negotiation situations where they received an unfairly low offer. Researchers found that subjects with testosterone responded almost uni formally with a similarly low offer as a sign of retaliation. When the offers were deemed "fair" however, testosterone ceased to be an indicator.

Stress mitigates the affects of testosterone.

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Research shows that traders who are in daily possession of more testosterone attack the day with vim, vigor and risk on their minds while traders who have higher levels of Cortisol, a hormone most associated with stress, are more cautious and less likely to make aggressive trades, and often become less successful.

Men with children have less "salivary testosterone" than men who don't

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A study from The Royal Society of Biological Sciences in Britain showed data that men who have children also have less testosterone in samples of their saliva than men who don't have children. The levels also vary wildly between unmarried and married men with and without children.

According to Coates, "During the dot-com bubble, people who were working with me displayed all the classic symptoms of mania: They were euphoric, delusional, and overconfident; they couldn't put a coherent sentence together; and they were unusually horny, judging from the number of lewd comments and the amount of porn that was showing up on their computer screens."